Quotes About History

Look back only for as long as you must, Then go forward into the history you will make. Be good, then better.

El pasado, creo, es mucho más difícil de ocultar que el presente.

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

the people--want to live in peace and to be loved for who they are, to fuck and be fucked. It means we are predestined by history to be the cuckolds of humanity...She betrayed us because we did not love her for who she is, without ulterior motives.

The Risorgimento hymn returned to his mind and with it the recognition of all that Italy had once been and which, even now, amid the decadence and carelessness, still remained tragically magnificent.

Unless you eat foods clearly marked "Certified organic by the USDA," you are taking part in a genetic experiment that is unprecedented in earth's long history.

Rather than resign herself to the fate dictated by her medical history, she has chosen a different, if less probable, outcome—one in which she is a shaman.

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the Spaniards, who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its righteousness.

What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread.

Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wildness left to cherish.

That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in . terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.

Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why conquests eventually defeat themselves.

Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

We cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.

Luther's revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.

Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther's rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk.

The Reformation became notorious for two fat men. The first, Martin Luther, we have already met. The second, King Henry VIII of England.